The seeds of a rapidly expanding company were planted after a friendly challenge over a broken smartphone.

Dan Peabody of Lansing is the owner of iCare Repair, which recently expanded to Livingston County with the opening of its seventh location this month at the Brookside Mall in Brighton. Store No. 8 is expected to open June 1 in the Green Oak Village Place shopping center in Green Oak Township.

The stores repair, buy and sell smartphones, tablets, iPods and other devices.

The first iCare Repair store opened in Okemos in 2012.

“It’s kind of a funny story,” Peabody said. “My friend’s sister broke her phone. It’s the kind of friendship where he and I always try to one-up each other in a friendly way. He tried repairing the device and couldn’t do it. I told him he should have brought it to me, but he said, ‘No, it was way too hard.’ ”

Peabody’s response was to find another broken phone, get the necessary parts, fix it and show it to his mechanical engineer friend.

“One thing led to another, and I opened the first iCare Repair two months later (in Okemos),” he said.

Since then, Peabody has opened iCare stores in Lansing, Muskegon, Holland and Jackson. Another iCare store in Battle Ground, Washington, is run by Peabody’s mechanical engineer friend.

While he couldn’t provide any details, Peabody said there are plans to keep expanding and open new locations “in the very near future.”

“We are doing very well,” he said.

Each of the stores typically employs a full-time manager, two full-time employees and two part-time workers, Peabody said.

The most common repairs called for on devices include cracked screens, batteries that do not hold a charge, bad charge ports and speakers that are not working properly. The stores also sell refurbished smartphones and tablets, and sell accessories for devices.

What sets iCare stores apart, Peabody said, is the “speed and price” of its services.

“Instead of sending your phone to a repair facility and it taking three days to get the phone back, we get most repairs done in about 30 minutes,” he said.

Before opening iCare Repair, Peabody, 31, worked as an airplane mechanic in Lansing.

“I worked on the avionics side, instrument panels and stuff like that,” he said.

The new iCare store in Brighton is at 101 Brookside Lane, Suite P, near Grand River Avenue. The Green Oak Township store is expected to open in June at 9416 Village Place Boulevard in the Green Oak Village Place shopping center.